Transcript
00:00:00 How would you, as a higher intelligence,
00:00:02 represent yourself to a lesser intelligence?
00:00:06 Do you think they saw what they say they saw?
00:00:09 It didn’t just start showing up in 1947.
00:00:12 How hard do you think it is for aliens
00:00:13 to communicate with humans?
00:00:15 What do we believe in?
00:00:15 We believe in technology.
00:00:16 So you show yourself as a form of technology, right?
00:00:20 But the common thread is you’re not alone.
00:00:24 And there’s something else here with you.
00:00:26 And there’s something that’s, as you said, watching you.
00:00:31 You are a professor at Stanford
00:00:33 studying the biology of the human organism
00:00:36 at the level of individual cells.
00:00:38 So let me ask first the big,
00:00:42 ridiculous philosophical question.
00:00:43 What is the most beautiful or fascinating aspect
00:00:47 of human biology at the level of the cell to you?
00:00:50 The micromachines and the nanomachines
00:00:52 that proteins make and become,
00:00:54 that to me is the most interesting.
00:00:56 The fact that you have this basically dynamic computer
00:01:02 within every cell that’s constantly processing
00:01:04 its environment, and at the heart of it is DNA,
00:01:08 which is a dynamic machine, a dynamic computation process.
00:01:12 People think of the DNA as a linear code.
00:01:16 It’s codes within codes within codes.
00:01:18 And it is actually the epigenetic state
00:01:21 that’s doing this amazing processing.
00:01:23 I mean, if you ever wanted to believe in God,
00:01:26 just look inside the cell.
00:01:28 So DNA is both information and computer.
00:01:30 Exactly.
00:01:32 How did that computer come about?
00:01:34 A big continuing on the philosophical question.
00:01:37 Is this both scientific and philosophical?
00:01:39 How did life originate on Earth, do you think?
00:01:42 How did this, at every level, so the very first step
00:01:46 and the fascinating complex computer that is DNA,
00:01:50 that is multicellular organism,
00:01:52 and then maybe the fascinating complex computer
00:01:56 that is the human mind?
00:01:58 Well, I think you have to take just one more step back
00:02:01 to the complex computer that is the universe, right?
00:02:04 All of the so called particles or the waves
00:02:08 that people think the universe is made of
00:02:10 and appears, to me at least, to be a computational process.
00:02:14 And embedded in that is biology, right?
00:02:18 So all the atoms of a protein, et cetera,
00:02:21 sit in that computational matrix.
00:02:23 From my point of view, it’s computing something.
00:02:26 It’s computing towards something.
00:02:28 It was created, in some ways, if you want to believe in God,
00:02:31 and I don’t know that I do,
00:02:32 but if you want to believe in something,
00:02:35 the universe was created or at least enabled
00:02:38 to allow for life to form.
00:02:40 And so the DNA, if you ask, where does DNA come from?
00:02:45 And you can go all the way back to Richard Dawkins
00:02:47 and the selfish gene hypothesis.
00:02:50 The way I look at DNA, though,
00:02:52 is it is not a moment in time.
00:02:56 It assumes the context of the body and the environment
00:02:59 in which it’s going to live.
00:03:00 And so if you want to ask a question of where
00:03:04 and how does information get stored,
00:03:07 DNA, although it’s only 3 billion base pairs long,
00:03:10 contains more information than, I think,
00:03:14 the entire computational memory resources
00:03:18 of our current technology.
00:03:20 Because who and what you are is both what you were as an egg
00:03:24 all the way through to the day you die,
00:03:27 and it embodies all the different cell types
00:03:29 and organs in your body.
00:03:31 And so it’s a computational reservoir
00:03:36 of information and expectation that you will become.
00:03:40 So actually, I would sort of turn it around a different way
00:03:43 and say, if you wanted to create
00:03:46 the best memory storage system possible,
00:03:50 you could reverse engineer what a human is
00:03:53 and create a DNA memory system
00:03:56 that is not just the linear version,
00:03:59 but is also everything that it could become.
00:04:03 When we’re talking about DNA,
00:04:04 we’re talking about Earth and the environment creating DNA.
00:04:06 So you’re talking about trying to come up
00:04:09 with an optimal computer for this particular environment.
00:04:12 Right.
00:04:13 So if you were to reverse engineer that computer,
00:04:19 what do you mean by considering
00:04:21 all the possible things it could become?
00:04:22 So who you are today, right?
00:04:24 So 3 billion bits of information
00:04:27 does not explain Lex Friedman, doesn’t explain me, right?
00:04:31 But the DNA embodies the expectation
00:04:35 of the environment in which you will live and grow
00:04:40 and become.
00:04:41 So all the information that is you, right,
00:04:44 is actually not only embedded in the DNA,
00:04:48 but it’s embedded in the context
00:04:50 of the world in which you grow into and develop, right?
00:04:55 But so all that information though
00:04:57 is packed in the expectation of what the DNA expects to see.
00:05:01 Interesting.
00:05:02 So like some of the information,
00:05:04 is that accurate to say is stored outside the body?
00:05:08 Exactly, yeah.
00:05:09 The information is stored outside
00:05:11 because there’s a context of expectation.
00:05:13 Isn’t that interesting?
00:05:14 Yeah, it’s fascinating.
00:05:15 I mean, to linger on this point,
00:05:20 if we were to run Earth over again a million times,
00:05:24 how many different versions
00:05:26 of this type of computer would we get?
00:05:28 I think it would be different each time.
00:05:29 I mean, if you assume there’s no such thing as fate, right,
00:05:33 and it’s not all pre programmed,
00:05:35 and that there is some sort of, let’s say,
00:05:37 variation or randomness at the beginning,
00:05:40 you would get as many different versions of life
00:05:43 as you could imagine.
00:05:45 And I don’t think it would all be
00:05:46 unless there’s something built into the substrate
00:05:50 of the universe.
00:05:51 It wouldn’t always be left handed proteins, right?
00:05:55 But I wonder what the flap of a butterfly wing,
00:05:58 what effects it has,
00:06:01 because it’s possible that this system
00:06:04 is really good at finding the efficient answer,
00:06:07 and maybe the efficient answer is,
00:06:11 there’s only a small finite set of them
00:06:13 for this particular environment.
00:06:14 Exactly, exactly.
00:06:16 That’s the kind of, in a way, the anthropomorphic universe
00:06:19 of the multiverse expectations, right?
00:06:21 That there’s probably a zillion other kinds of universes
00:06:24 out there if you believe in multiverse theory.
00:06:28 We only live in the ones where the rules are such
00:06:32 that lifelike hours can exist.
00:06:35 So using that logic, how many alien civilizations
00:06:39 do you think are out there?
00:06:40 There’s like trillions of environments, aka planets,
00:06:48 or maybe you can think even bigger than planets.
00:06:51 How many lifelike organisms do you think
00:06:55 are out there thriving, and maybe how many
00:06:58 do you think are long gone, but were once here?
00:07:01 I think, well, innumerable, I think in terms
00:07:05 of the present. Greater than zero.
00:07:06 Much greater than zero.
00:07:08 I mean, I would just be surprised.
00:07:09 What a waste, right, of all that space just for us
00:07:12 if we’re never gonna get there.
00:07:15 That would be my first way to think about it.
00:07:19 But second, I mean, I remember when I was about
00:07:25 seven or eight years old, and I would love
00:07:27 if any of your listeners could find
00:07:29 this National Geographic.
00:07:31 I remember opening the page of the National Geographic.
00:07:35 I was about, again, seven to 10 years old,
00:07:37 and it was sort of a current picture of the universe.
00:07:42 It was around probably 1968, 1969.
00:07:45 I just remember looking at it and thinking,
00:07:48 what kinds of empires have risen and fallen
00:07:53 across that space that we’ll never know about?
00:07:57 And isn’t that sad that we know nothing
00:08:01 about something so grand?
00:08:03 And so I’ve always been a reader of science fiction
00:08:08 because I like the creative ideas
00:08:11 of what people come up with.
00:08:13 And I especially like science fiction writers
00:08:16 that base it in good science,
00:08:18 but base it also in evolution.
00:08:21 That if you evolve a civilization from something
00:08:26 lifelike, right, some sort of biology,
00:08:29 its assumptions about the universe will come
00:08:31 from the environment in which it grew up.
00:08:36 So for instance, Larry Niven is a great writer,
00:08:39 and he imagines different kinds of civilizations.
00:08:43 In some cases, what happens if intelligence
00:08:48 evolved from a herd animal, right?
00:08:50 Would you lead from behind, right?
00:08:53 Would you be, you know, in his case,
00:08:56 one of them were the so called puppeteers.
00:08:59 And to them, the moral imperative is cowardice.
00:09:03 You put other people forward to run the risk for you, right?
00:09:07 And so he writes entire books around that premise.
00:09:11 There’s another guy, Brin, David Brin is his name,
00:09:15 and he writes the so called uplift universe books.
00:09:19 And in those, he takes different intelligences,
00:09:24 each from a different evolutionary background.
00:09:28 And then he posits a civilization based around
00:09:33 where and what they came from.
00:09:36 And so to me, I mean, that’s just fun.
00:09:39 But I mean, back to your original question is
00:09:42 how many are there?
00:09:43 I think as many stars as we can see.
00:09:47 Now, how many are currently there?
00:09:49 I don’t know, I mean, that’s the whole question of,
00:09:53 you know, how long can a civilization last
00:09:55 before it runs out of steam?
00:09:58 And you, for instance, does it just get bored
00:10:02 or does it transcend to something else?
00:10:03 Or does it say, I’ve seen enough and I’m done?
00:10:06 What does running out of steam look like?
00:10:08 It could be destroy itself or get bored.
00:10:10 You know, or we’ve done everything we can
00:10:13 and they just decide to stop.
00:10:16 I don’t know, I just don’t know.
00:10:17 It’s that you all must worry that we stop reproducing
00:10:21 or we slow down the reproduction rate
00:10:23 to where the population can go to zero.
00:10:25 We can go to zero and we can’t and we collapse.
00:10:27 I mean, so the only way to get around that
00:10:30 is perhaps create enough machines with AI
00:10:35 to take care of us.
00:10:38 What could possibly go wrong?
00:10:41 You’ve talked to people that told stories
00:10:44 of UFO encounters.
00:10:47 What is the most fascinating to you about the stories
00:10:50 of these UFO encounters that you’ve heard
00:10:53 that people have told you?
00:10:54 The similarity of them, the uniformity of the stories.
00:11:00 Now, I just wanna say upfront,
00:11:04 a lot of people think that when I speculate,
00:11:08 I believe something, that’s not true, right?
00:11:11 Speculation is just creativity.
00:11:14 Speculation is the beginning of hypothesis.
00:11:17 None of what I hear in terms of the anecdotes
00:11:21 do I necessarily believe are they true?
00:11:24 But I still find them fascinating to listen to
00:11:26 because at some level they’re still raw data
00:11:29 and you have to listen.
00:11:30 And once you start to hear the same story again and again,
00:11:35 then you have to say, well, there might be something to it.
00:11:37 I mean, maybe it’s some kind of a Jungian background
00:11:42 in the human mind and human consciousness
00:11:44 that creates these stories again and again
00:11:47 as coming out of the DNA,
00:11:48 it’s coming out of that pre programmed something.
00:11:51 And Jung talked quite a bit about this kind of thing.
00:11:54 The collective unconscious.
00:11:56 But actually one of the most interesting ones I find
00:11:58 is this constant message
00:12:03 that you’re not taking care of your world.
00:12:07 And this came long before climate change.
00:12:11 It came long before many kinds of,
00:12:15 let’s say current day memes around
00:12:19 taking care of our planet, pollution, et cetera.
00:12:25 And so, for instance, perhaps the best example of this,
00:12:28 the one that I find the most fascinating
00:12:30 is a story out of Zimbabwe, 50 or 60 children,
00:12:35 one afternoon in Zimbabwe.
00:12:39 It was a well educated group of white and black children
00:12:43 who had lunchtime in the playground, saw a craft
00:12:49 and they saw little men.
00:12:51 And they all ran into the teachers
00:12:53 and they told the same story and they drew the same pictures.
00:12:56 And the message several of them got was
00:13:00 you are not taking care of your planet.
00:13:03 And it got, you know, there’s actually a movie coming out
00:13:06 on this episode and 30 years later now,
00:13:11 the people who were there, the children
00:13:13 who’ve now grown up say, it happened to us.
00:13:16 Now, did it happen?
00:13:18 Was it some sort of hallucination
00:13:20 or was it an imposed hallucination by something?
00:13:23 Was it material?
00:13:24 I don’t know, but these kids were seven to 10 years old.
00:13:30 You see them on video.
00:13:32 Seven to 10 year olds can’t lie like that.
00:13:35 And so, you know, whether it’s real or not, I don’t know,
00:13:39 but I find that fascinating data.
00:13:41 And again, it’s these unconnected stories
00:13:45 of individuals with the same story.
00:13:50 That is worthy of further inquiry.
00:13:56 Yeah, so here we are humans with limited cognitive capacities
00:14:00 trying to make sense of the world,
00:14:02 trying to understand what is real and not.
00:14:04 We have this DNA that somehow in complex ways
00:14:07 is interacting with the environment.
00:14:09 And then we get these novel ideas
00:14:16 that come from the populace.
00:14:19 And then they make us wonder about what it all means.
00:14:26 And so how to interpret it.
00:14:27 If you think from an alien perspective,
00:14:29 how would you communicate with other lifelike organisms?
00:14:34 You perhaps have to find in points
00:14:38 on this interaction between the DNA and its manifestations
00:14:43 in terms of the human mind
00:14:46 and how it interacts with the environment.
00:14:49 So it gets some kind of, all right, what is this DNA?
00:14:52 What does this environment have to get in somehow
00:14:55 to like interact with it, to perturb the system
00:14:59 to where these little ants, human like ants
00:15:02 get like excited and figures and see stuff out.
00:15:05 Yeah, it has, and then somehow steer them.
00:15:09 First of all, for investigative purposes,
00:15:11 understand like oftentimes to understand a system,
00:15:14 you have to perturb it.
00:15:15 Exactly, yeah.
00:15:16 It’s like poke at it to get excited or not.
00:15:19 And then the other ways you want to,
00:15:23 if you worry about them,
00:15:25 you can steer in one direction or another.
00:15:28 And this kind of idea that we’re not taking care
00:15:31 of our world, that’s interesting.
00:15:34 I mean, that’s comforting, that’s hopeful
00:15:36 because that means the greater intelligence,
00:15:39 which is what I would hope would want to take care of us.
00:15:42 Like we want to take care of the gorillas
00:15:44 in the national parks in Africa.
00:15:47 Yeah, but we don’t want to take care of cockroaches.
00:15:49 So there’s a line we draw.
00:15:51 So you have to hope that.
00:15:53 Right now we’re a bunch of angry monkeys
00:15:55 and maybe whatever these intelligences are,
00:15:59 are also keeping an eye on us.
00:16:01 That you don’t want a bunch of,
00:16:03 you don’t want the angry monkey troop
00:16:06 stomping around the local galactic arm.
00:16:08 Do you think these folks are telling the truth?
00:16:11 Do you think they saw what they say they saw?
00:16:15 I think they saw what they said they saw,
00:16:19 but I also think they saw what they were shown.
00:16:22 I mean, if you go back to the whole notion of,
00:16:25 okay, how long has this been around?
00:16:28 It didn’t just start showing up in 1947, right?
00:16:31 There are stories going back into the 1800s
00:16:36 of people who saw things in their farming,
00:16:39 in their farm fields in the US.
00:16:40 It’s in local newspapers from the 1800s, it’s fascinating.
00:16:46 But if you can go even further back,
00:16:48 so to your point of how would you as a higher intelligence
00:16:54 represent yourself to a lesser intelligence?
00:16:58 So let’s go back to pre civilization.
00:17:01 Maybe you show yourself as the spirits in the forest
00:17:05 and you give messages through that.
00:17:08 Once you get a little bit more civilized,
00:17:10 then you show yourself as the gods and then you’re God.
00:17:13 Well, we don’t believe in God anymore necessarily,
00:17:16 not everybody does.
00:17:17 So what do we believe in?
00:17:18 We believe in technology.
00:17:19 So you show yourself as a form of technology, right?
00:17:22 But the common thread is you’re not alone
00:17:25 and there’s something else here with you.
00:17:28 And there’s something that’s, as you said, watching you
00:17:31 and at least watching over your shoulder.
00:17:35 But I think that like any good parent,
00:17:38 you don’t tell your student everything, you make them learn
00:17:44 and learning requires mistakes
00:17:46 because if you tell them everything, then they get lazy.
00:17:50 You’ve looked at the brains of, or information coming
00:17:56 from the brain of some of the people
00:17:58 that have had UFO encounters.
00:17:59 What’s common about the brain of people
00:18:01 who encounter UFOs?
00:18:04 So the study started with a group of,
00:18:07 let’s say a cohort of individuals that were brought to me
00:18:11 and their MRIs to ask about the damage
00:18:16 that had been seen in these individuals.
00:18:19 It turns out that the majority of those patients
00:18:21 ended up being, as far as we can tell, Havana syndrome.
00:18:24 And so for me at least, that part of the story ends
00:18:28 in terms of the injury,
00:18:30 it’s likely almost all Havana syndrome.
00:18:33 That’s somebody else’s problem now, that’s not my problem.
00:18:38 But when we were looking at the brains of these individuals,
00:18:41 we noticed something right in the center
00:18:44 of the basal ganglia in many of these individuals
00:18:47 that at first we thought was damage.
00:18:49 It was basically an enriched patch of MRI dense neurons
00:18:56 that we thought was damage,
00:18:57 but then it was showing up in everybody.
00:18:59 And then we looked and we said, oh, it’s actually not.
00:19:01 The other readings on these MRIs showed
00:19:04 that actually that’s living tissue.
00:19:06 That’s actually the head of the caudate in the pitamen.
00:19:10 And at the time, and I remember even asking
00:19:12 a good friend of mine at Stanford, who was a psychiatrist,
00:19:16 what does the basal ganglia do?
00:19:18 He said, oh, the basal ganglia is just about movement
00:19:21 and nerve and motor control.
00:19:24 I said, well, that’s odd because these other papers
00:19:27 that we were reading at the time started to suggest
00:19:30 that it was involved with higher intelligence
00:19:34 and is actually downstream of the executive function
00:19:38 and involved with intuition and planning.
00:19:42 And then if you think about it,
00:19:44 if you’re gonna have motor control,
00:19:46 which is centralized in one place,
00:19:48 motor control requires knowledge of the environment.
00:19:52 You don’t wanna move something and hit the table.
00:19:55 Or if you’re walking across a room,
00:19:57 you want to be aware and cognizant
00:20:01 of what you might bump into.
00:20:03 So obviously all of that planning
00:20:08 requires access to all the senses.
00:20:11 It requires access to your desires, memory,
00:20:14 knowledge of where and what you want
00:20:16 and desire to walk nearby.
00:20:18 Like I used the example of if you’re at a party,
00:20:20 you wanna avoid that person, you like that person,
00:20:22 the waiter is about to drop something.
00:20:25 All without thinking, you maneuver.
00:20:28 So that actually, all that planning is done
00:20:31 in the basal ganglia.
00:20:33 And it’s actually now called the brain within the brain.
00:20:36 It’s a goal processing system.
00:20:40 Subservient to executive function.
00:20:43 So what we think we found there was not something
00:20:48 which allows people to talk to UFOs.
00:20:50 I mean, I think the UFO community took it a step too far.
00:20:55 What I think we found was a form of higher
00:21:00 functioning and processing.
00:21:01 So what we then looked at,
00:21:03 and this was the most fascinating part of it,
00:21:05 we looked then at individuals in the families
00:21:09 or those, let’s say the index case individuals.
00:21:14 And we found that it was actually in families.
00:21:16 And more so, this is the most fascinating part.
00:21:20 We’ve probably looked now at about 200 just random cases
00:21:24 that you can download off of databases online.
00:21:27 You don’t see this higher connectivity.
00:21:31 You only find it in what Kit Green would have called
00:21:34 or has called higher functioning individuals.
00:21:37 People who are, I mean, he called them savants.
00:21:42 I don’t have the means to, we haven’t done the testing.
00:21:47 But it turns out my family has it, right?
00:21:49 We found it in me, my brother, my sister, my mother.
00:21:55 We found it as well in other individuals,
00:21:57 husband and wife pairs.
00:21:59 So statistically, if you had a group of 20 individuals
00:22:03 and you found two husband wife pairs, both of whom had it,
00:22:06 and yet it’s only found at about, we think,
00:22:08 one in 200, one in 300 individuals.
00:22:11 The fact that two individuals came together,
00:22:14 two sets of individuals came together,
00:22:15 both of whom had it, implied either
00:22:18 a restricted breeding group or attraction.
00:22:25 The reason why it seems to be in, let’s say,
00:22:29 so called experiencers or people who claim,
00:22:33 if intuition is the ability to see something
00:22:36 that other people don’t,
00:22:36 and I don’t mean that in a paranormal sense,
00:22:40 but being able to see something just in front of you
00:22:42 that other people might just dismiss,
00:22:45 well, maybe that’s a function of a higher kind
00:22:48 of intelligence to say, well, I’m not looking at an artifact.
00:22:55 I’m not looking at something that I should just ignore.
00:22:58 I’m seeing something and I recognize it for,
00:23:00 not what it is, but that it is something
00:23:02 different than what is normally found in my environment.
00:23:06 Yeah, you know, I have a little bit of that.
00:23:09 I seem to see the magic in a lot of moments.
00:23:13 I have a deep, it’s obviously, not obviously,
00:23:16 but it seems to be chemical in nature
00:23:19 that I just am excited about life.
00:23:23 I love life.
00:23:25 I love stupid things.
00:23:26 It feels like I’m high a lot,
00:23:28 on mushrooms or something like that,
00:23:30 where you’d really appreciate that.
00:23:32 So I’m able to detect something about the environment
00:23:38 that maybe others don’t, I don’t know,
00:23:40 but I seem to be over the top grateful to be alive
00:23:45 for a lot of stupid reasons, and that’s in there somewhere.
00:23:49 I mean, it’s kind of interesting
00:23:50 because it really is true that our brains,
00:23:56 the way we’re brought up, but also the genetics
00:23:59 enables us to see certain slices of the world,
00:24:03 and some people are probably more receptive
00:24:08 to anomalous information.
00:24:12 They see the magic, the possibility in the novel thing
00:24:18 as opposed to kind of finding the pattern
00:24:21 of the common, of the regular.
00:24:24 Some people are more, wait a minute, this is kind of weird.
00:24:27 I mean, a lot of those people would probably
00:24:28 become scientists too.
00:24:30 Like, huh, there’s this pattern happening
00:24:34 over and over and over, and then something weird
00:24:36 just happened, and then you get excited by that weirdness
00:24:41 and start to pull the string and discover
00:24:44 what is at the core of that weirdness.
00:24:46 Perhaps, is that, maybe by way of question,
00:24:53 how does the human perception system deal
00:24:55 with anomalous information, do you think?
00:24:57 Well, it first tries to classify it
00:24:59 and get it out of the way.
00:25:00 If it’s not food, if it’s not sex, right?
00:25:04 If it’s not in the way of my desires,
00:25:08 or if it is in the way of my desires,
00:25:10 then you focus on it.
00:25:13 And so I think the question is
00:25:16 how much spare processing power,
00:25:19 how much CPU cycles do we spend
00:25:22 on things that are not those core desires?
00:25:28 What is the most kind of memorable, powerful
00:25:35 UFO encounter report you ever heard?
00:25:38 Just to you, on a personal level,
00:25:40 like something that was really powerful.
00:25:42 Well, I mentioned the Zimbabwe one.
00:25:45 That’s particularly interesting.
00:25:47 And one that actually most people don’t know about,
00:25:50 but family driving down the highway,
00:25:54 two little girls in the back, open glass topped car,
00:26:00 and the little girls see a craft right over their car.
00:26:06 This is in the middle of the day on a busy highway.
00:26:10 The mother sees it.
00:26:12 Nobody can, they look around, nobody else seems to see it.
00:26:16 So the girls take out their camera, take a picture of it,
00:26:19 and then they get home.
00:26:22 They look at the picture.
00:26:24 There’s no craft, but there’s a little object
00:26:28 about 30 feet above their car or so,
00:26:31 probably about three feet across, kind of star shaped.
00:26:36 It’s not the craft, but it’s something else.
00:26:39 Obviously there was something there.
00:26:41 And so what were they seeing?
00:26:42 Were they seeing a projection?
00:26:44 Were they seeing, and why were only they seeing it?
00:26:46 And the photograph was capturing something very different
00:26:52 than what we’re seeing, but they’re still an object.
00:26:55 Can you give a little bit of context?
00:26:58 Is this from modern day?
00:26:59 It’s modern day.
00:27:00 Oh yeah, they had a camera.
00:27:01 I mean, they had a cell phone camera.
00:27:02 And this is like a report provided.
00:27:06 By the way, where is a central place to provide a report?
00:27:08 Is this?
00:27:09 Oh, there’s a move on, but this isn’t public.
00:27:11 I’ve seen the picture.
00:27:12 Oh, this is something you’ve directly interacted with.
00:27:14 Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen the picture.
00:27:16 So those moments like that, they captivate your mind.
00:27:23 It’s so different,
00:27:24 and it doesn’t fall into the standard story at all.
00:27:26 But it also, but in another way, it’s kind of a,
00:27:31 it’s a clear enunciation of this notion
00:27:33 that when people see events,
00:27:36 they don’t all see the same thing.
00:27:37 Now, we’ve heard this about traffic accidents.
00:27:40 Different people will see the color of the car differently
00:27:42 or the chain of events differently.
00:27:44 And this tells you that memory isn’t anywhere near
00:27:47 what we think it is.
00:27:48 But the issue around these so called UFO reports
00:27:52 is that the same people will see a very different thing,
00:27:56 almost as if whatever it is is projecting a,
00:28:01 is projecting something into the mind
00:28:04 rather than it being real, right?
00:28:06 Rather than it being a real manifestation,
00:28:09 material in front of you,
00:28:11 it’s actually almost some sort of an altered virtual reality
00:28:16 that is imposed on you.
00:28:18 I mean, I think the company Meta
00:28:21 and all the virtual reality companies
00:28:23 would love to have something like that, right?
00:28:26 Where you don’t have to actually wear something
00:28:27 on your face to experience a virtual reality.
00:28:31 What happens if you could just project it?
00:28:33 Well, that’s the fundamental question
00:28:35 from an alien perspective.
00:28:37 When you look at it, or as we humans look at ants,
00:28:40 how does its perception system operate?
00:28:43 So not only how does this thing’s mind operate,
00:28:45 how does the human mind operate,
00:28:47 but how does their perception system operate
00:28:50 so that we can stimulate the perception system properly
00:28:55 to get them to think certain things.
00:28:57 And so, that’s a really important question.
00:29:02 Humans think that the only way to communicate
00:29:06 is in 3D or 4D space time, there’s physical objects,
00:29:12 or maybe you write things into some kind of language.
00:29:15 But there could be just so much more richness
00:29:22 in how you can communicate.
00:29:23 And so, from an alien perspective,
00:29:25 where somebody has much greater technological capabilities,
00:29:28 you have to figure out how do I use the skills I have
00:29:31 to stimulate the limited humans.
00:29:35 Right, well, I mean, let’s take the ants exam
00:29:37 again as an example.
00:29:38 Let’s say that you wanted to make ants practical.
00:29:43 You wanted to use them for something, right?
00:29:45 You wanted to use them as a form of biological robot.
00:29:47 Now, DARPA and other people have been trying
00:29:50 to use insects for, turn them into biological robots.
00:29:56 But if you wanted to, you would have to interact
00:29:58 with their sense of smell, right?
00:30:02 Their pheromone system that they use to interact
00:30:05 with each other.
00:30:06 So you would either create those molecules
00:30:10 to talk to them, to make them do,
00:30:12 I’m not saying talk to them as if they’re intelligent,
00:30:13 but talk to them to manipulate them in ways that you want.
00:30:16 Or if you were advanced enough,
00:30:19 you would use some sort of electromagnetic or other means
00:30:24 to stimulate their neurons in ways
00:30:26 that would accomplish the same goal as the pheromones,
00:30:30 but by doing it in a sort of a telefactoring way.
00:30:34 So let’s say you wanted to telefactor with humans.
00:30:37 You would interact with them.
00:30:40 And this is, again, this is a technology
00:30:42 which you could imagine possible.
00:30:45 You could telefactor information
00:30:47 into the sensory system of a human, right?
00:30:50 But then each human is a little bit different.
00:30:53 So either you know enough about them to tailor it
00:30:56 to that individual, or you just basically take advantage
00:30:58 of whatever the sensory net is that that individual has.
00:31:02 So if you happen to be good at sound,
00:31:05 or you happen to be a very visually inclined individual,
00:31:08 then maybe the sensory information that you get
00:31:11 that’s most effective in terms of transmitting information
00:31:15 would come through that portal.
00:31:17 I think the aliens would need to figure out
00:31:19 that humans value physical consistency.
00:31:22 So we’ve discovered physics.
00:31:25 So we want our perception to make sense.
00:31:28 Maybe they don’t, you know,
00:31:30 that’s not an obvious fact of perception,
00:31:32 that you have to figure out what kind of things
00:31:37 are humans used to observing
00:31:39 in this particular environment of Earth,
00:31:41 and how do we stimulate the perception system
00:31:44 in a way that’s not anomalous,
00:31:47 or not too, it doesn’t cross that threshold
00:31:50 of just like, well, that’s way too weird.
00:31:53 So they have to, I mean, that’s not obvious
00:31:56 that that should be important.
00:31:58 Maybe you wanna err on the side of anomaly,
00:32:02 like lean into the weirdness.
00:32:04 So communication is complicated.
00:32:06 Well, that’s why I always find this issue
00:32:09 of people talking about the so called grays as interesting,
00:32:13 because it is related to what you’re saying.
00:32:17 They’re different enough,
00:32:19 but they’re not so different as to be scary, right?
00:32:22 They’re not venom dripping fangs, right?
00:32:25 They’re different enough,
00:32:27 but it’s also like they’re what you could imagine
00:32:32 us becoming in some distant future.
00:32:34 So is that a purposeful representation?
00:32:37 I don’t know.
00:32:38 I mean, I don’t believe in the grays, for instance,
00:32:41 but I believe that people think that they see it.
00:32:44 So if we’re talking about a communication strategy
00:32:47 that says, you know, we’re like you,
00:32:50 but not the same as you,
00:32:53 this might be a manifestation that you represent
00:32:57 in terms of a communication strategy.
00:33:00 What do you make of David’s favorite sighting
00:33:04 of the Tic Tac UFO,
00:33:06 and other pilots who have seen these objects
00:33:09 that seem to defy the laws of physics?
00:33:12 Well, I think you have to take them at their word.
00:33:17 Are they fascinating to you?
00:33:18 Oh, absolutely.
00:33:18 No, I know a lot of these people, right?
00:33:20 So I know Lou Elizondo, Chris Mellon,
00:33:24 the whole crowd I’ve been,
00:33:26 I saw the videos about three weeks or so
00:33:30 before they went public.
00:33:33 I was at a bar with Lou overlooking the Pentagon
00:33:38 in Crystal City, and they showed them to me,
00:33:40 and my hair stood on end.
00:33:42 And he said, this is coming out soon.
00:33:45 And I know one of the guys on the inside
00:33:49 who was the Naval Intelligence
00:33:51 who had interviewed all of these pilots again
00:33:53 before this came out.
00:33:55 And it was hair raising to hear this,
00:33:58 but also exciting that here’s not just people’s testimony,
00:34:04 these are credible individuals.
00:34:05 And if you’ve seen the 60 minute episode
00:34:08 with some of the pilots,
00:34:11 they have no monetary gain.
00:34:13 If anything, they’ve got negative gain from coming out.
00:34:16 But then you also have all of those simultaneous
00:34:21 ship analysis from the USS Princeton
00:34:23 and the radar analysis, et cetera.
00:34:26 So at the end of the day, it’s just data.
00:34:32 It’s not a conclusion.
00:34:35 I’d be perfectly happy, honestly, perfectly happy
00:34:38 if somebody showed that it was all a hoax.
00:34:41 I can go back to my day job, right?
00:34:44 That could be a hoax, but other things might not be.
00:34:47 This is the point.
00:34:49 This is why it’s nice to remove some of the stigma
00:34:53 about this topic because it’s all just data
00:34:55 and anomalous events are such that they’re going to be rare
00:35:03 in terms of how much data they represent.
00:35:05 But we have to consider the full range of data
00:35:08 to discover the things that actually represent something
00:35:11 that’s, if we pull at it, we’ll discover something
00:35:14 that’s extraterrestrial or something deep
00:35:18 about the phenomena on Earth that we don’t yet understand.
00:35:21 Right.
00:35:22 Well, if it only stimulates people, for instance,
00:35:26 to think, okay, well, what happens if we could move
00:35:29 like that with momentumless movement?
00:35:32 And it stimulates young individuals to go into the sciences
00:35:38 to ask those questions.
00:35:40 That to me is fascinating.
00:35:41 I mean, after I’ve been openly talking about this
00:35:44 in the last year, especially, I’ve had a number
00:35:47 of students from top schools who aren’t my students
00:35:52 come to me and say, if I can help, let me.
00:35:57 How can I help?
00:35:58 I never had thought about this before,
00:35:59 but you opened, you and others, not just you and others,
00:36:02 have opened my mind to thinking about this matter.
00:36:06 Yeah, that’s why it’s actually funny
00:36:07 that Elon Musk doesn’t think too much about this,
00:36:13 these kinds of propulsion systems that could defy
00:36:15 the laws of physics as we currently understand them.
00:36:18 To me, it’s a powerful way to think what is possible.
00:36:23 It’s inspiring, even if some of the data
00:36:26 doesn’t represent extraterrestrial vehicles.
00:36:30 I think the observation itself,
00:36:32 it’s like something you mentioned,
00:36:35 which is hypothesizing, imagining these things,
00:36:40 considering the possibility of these things,
00:36:43 I think opens up your mind in a way
00:36:45 that ultimately can create the technology.
00:36:49 First, you have to believe the technology is possible
00:36:52 before you can create it.
00:36:54 In my own lab, we always look for,
00:36:58 as I’ve said before, what is inevitable,
00:37:00 and saying inevitably this is the kind of data we need,
00:37:05 but if we need that kind of data,
00:37:06 the instrument we want doesn’t exist.
00:37:10 Okay, so I imagine the perfect instrument, I can’t make it,
00:37:14 and you back into something which is practical,
00:37:18 and then you, in a sense, reverse engineer the future
00:37:22 of what it is that you wanna make.
00:37:24 And I’ve started and sold at least half a dozen
00:37:28 or more companies using that basic premise.
00:37:32 And so it was always something that didn’t exist today,
00:37:35 but we imagined what we wanted.
00:37:38 And at the time, many people said it couldn’t be done.
00:37:41 I mean, for instance, all the gene therapy
00:37:43 that’s done today with retroviruses
00:37:46 came from a group meeting in David Baltimore’s lab.
00:37:49 I was a postdoc with him, and one of the other postdocs
00:37:54 wasn’t able to make retroviruses in a way
00:37:58 that he wanted to, and I realized I had a cell line
00:38:00 that would allow us to make retroviruses
00:38:02 in two days rather than two months.
00:38:05 And so he and I then worked together to make that system,
00:38:09 and now all gene therapy with retroviruses
00:38:11 is done using this basic approach around the whole world,
00:38:14 because something couldn’t be done,
00:38:17 and we wanted to do it better, and we imagined the future.
00:38:22 And so that’s, I think, what the whole UFO phenomenon
00:38:27 is doing for people.
00:38:28 It’s like, well, let’s imagine a future
00:38:30 where these kinds of technologies are,
00:38:33 but also let’s imagine a future
00:38:34 where we don’t blow ourselves up, right?
00:38:36 So if these things are there,
00:38:37 they manage to not blow themselves up.
00:38:40 So it means that at least one other civilization
00:38:44 got past the inflection point.
00:38:47 So if some of the encounters are actually representing
00:38:50 alien civilizations visiting us,
00:38:52 why do you think they’re doing so?
00:38:57 You suggested that perhaps it’s the study
00:39:00 understand their own past, right?
00:39:02 What are some of the motivations, do you think?
00:39:05 And again, from our perspective, us as humans,
00:39:09 what motivations would we have
00:39:11 when we approach other civilizations
00:39:12 we might discover in the future?
00:39:15 Well, I think one motivation might be
00:39:17 to steer us away from the precipice, right?
00:39:22 Or on the assumption that,
00:39:25 even if we make it past the precipice,
00:39:27 at least we’re not a bunch of psychopaths running around.
00:39:32 So maybe there’s a little bit of motivation there
00:39:35 to make sure that the neighbor that’s growing up next to you
00:39:38 is not unruly.
00:39:42 But I mean, maybe it’s sort of a moral imperative,
00:39:46 like what we have with creating national parks
00:39:52 where animals can continue to live out their lives
00:39:56 in a natural way.
00:39:58 I don’t know.
00:39:59 I mean, that would be, I mean, the problem is
00:40:02 we’re imagining from a anthropomorphic viewpoint
00:40:08 what an alien might think.
00:40:10 And as I’ve said before, alien means alien, right?
00:40:14 I mean, not Hollywood aliens,
00:40:17 but a whole different way of thinking
00:40:21 and a whole different level of experience
00:40:23 and let’s say wisdom, hopefully,
00:40:27 that we could only hope to understand.
00:40:30 Now, but if we ever get out there,
00:40:32 if we ever make it past our current problems,
00:40:37 and even if we don’t have faster than light travel,
00:40:39 and even if we’re only using ram scoops
00:40:43 or light sails to get where we wanna go,
00:40:46 and it takes us 10,000 years to get somewhere
00:40:50 or to spread out, we might encounter such things.
00:40:53 And are we just gonna stomp all over it
00:40:56 like we did in colonial South America or Africa
00:41:00 or all the rest on our current path, likely?
00:41:04 And so what are we gonna learn?
00:41:06 Well, we’re getting better and better
00:41:08 at understanding what is life.
00:41:10 And I think we’re getting better and better
00:41:13 at being careful, not to step on it when we see it.
00:41:17 And this is one of the nice things
00:41:19 about talking about UFOs is it expands the Overton window.
00:41:24 It expands our understanding of what possibly could be life.
00:41:28 It gets us to think.
00:41:29 It gets the scientific community to think.
00:41:32 When we go to Mars, when we go to these different moons
00:41:34 that possibly have life,
00:41:37 we’re not looking at legged organisms.
00:41:40 We’re looking at some kind of complexity
00:41:45 that arises in resistance to the natural world.
00:41:51 And there’s a lot of interesting.
00:41:54 I like that, resistance to the natural world, yeah.
00:41:57 So somehow there’s a rebellious process,
00:42:01 complex system going on here.
00:42:03 And I don’t know the many ways it could take form.
00:42:06 There’s a sense for aliens that as the technology develops,
00:42:12 they take form more and more as information,
00:42:16 as something that can influence the space of ideas,
00:42:21 of the processing of data itself.
00:42:24 So I just, this idea of embodiment that we humans so admire,
00:42:30 physically visible, perceivable embodiment
00:42:34 may be a very inefficient thing, right?
00:42:39 If you think just about your area, AI,
00:42:43 we’re trying to make smaller and smaller and smaller
00:42:49 circuitry that is basically closer and closer
00:42:55 to the physics of how the universe operates, right?
00:43:00 Right down at the level of, I mean, quantum computers
00:43:02 are basically right down about quantum information storage.
00:43:05 So fast forward 10,000, 100,000 years,
00:43:10 maybe somebody found a way to embody AI directly
00:43:13 into the physics of the universe, right?
00:43:16 And it doesn’t require a physical manifestation.
00:43:19 It just sits in space time.
00:43:22 It’s just a locally ordered space.
00:43:25 We’re just locally ordered space time, right?
00:43:28 You know, I mean, but maybe they just,
00:43:31 they found a way to embody it there.
00:43:33 They probably have to get really good
00:43:35 at not, you know, trampling on the ants.
00:43:38 The better your technology gets,
00:43:40 the easier it is to accidentally like, oops,
00:43:44 just destroy these simpleton biological systems.
00:43:48 We constantly think about whatever these things might be.
00:43:50 We think that they are some sort of a unified force.
00:43:56 Well, maybe they’re not unified.
00:43:58 Maybe they are as disparate as you and I are.
00:44:03 And maybe what keeps them from stomping all over the ants
00:44:06 is each other, right?
00:44:09 That they are in a self tension
00:44:11 to prevent one or more of them from running amok.
00:44:17 Oh, yeah.
00:44:18 I mean, that’s kind of the anarchy of nations
00:44:21 that we have on earth.
00:44:21 So there’s always going to be this.
00:44:27 There’s a hierarchy.
00:44:28 This hierarchy that’s formed
00:44:29 of greater and greater intelligences.
00:44:31 And they’re all probably also wondering,
00:44:34 wait, what’s bigger than me?
00:44:36 Exactly.
00:44:36 That’s what I always wonder is that maybe that they’re,
00:44:39 what keeps them in line is something that is beyond them.
00:44:43 Like what created the universe.
00:44:45 I mean, that’s probably a question that bothers them too.
00:44:50 What about the communication task itself?
00:44:53 How hard do you think it is for aliens
00:44:54 to communicate with humans?
00:44:56 So is this something you think about
00:45:00 about this barrier of communication
00:45:02 between biological systems and something else?
00:45:04 How difficult is it to find a common language?
00:45:08 Well, I think if you’re smart enough
00:45:11 or technologically enabled enough,
00:45:13 it’s relatively straightforward.
00:45:18 Now, whether your concepts
00:45:21 can ever be dumbed down to us,
00:45:27 that might be hard.
00:45:30 I mean.
00:45:30 Again, talking to the ants.
00:45:32 Talking to the ants.
00:45:33 I mean, they don’t.
00:45:34 On Instagram.
00:45:35 So.
00:45:38 You want to look good in this picture.
00:45:39 Let me explain to you.
00:45:40 Let me explain to you why.
00:45:41 Yeah.
00:45:44 So that’s the essential problem of,
00:45:46 you know, perhaps they realize
00:45:51 who it is that they’re talking to.
00:45:54 And they say, rather than muddy the picture,
00:45:57 we’re only going to give them limited information.
00:46:00 Yeah.
00:46:01 Right?
00:46:02 And yeah, maybe we could sit down,
00:46:04 like you and I, and have a conversation.
00:46:06 But then they would make assumptions.
00:46:09 The humans would then make assumptions about us
00:46:10 that aren’t true.
00:46:12 Because we’re not humans, right?
00:46:13 So let’s stay at arm’s length.
00:46:17 Let’s just let them know that we’re here, right?
00:46:21 And here’s the limited amount of communication.
00:46:23 Again, this notion that
00:46:26 if you give somebody everything, they’ll get lazy.
00:46:30 And, you know, if they’ve been around as long as they have,
00:46:34 they’ve seen every kind of thing that can go wrong.
00:46:37 And so they know as much as they might want to step in,
00:46:42 that that would be a wrong thing.
00:46:45 Yeah, you have to also understand
00:46:47 the amount of wisdom they carry.
00:46:50 Yeah.
00:46:52 You know, and so it’s very easy as well for religions to,
00:46:56 I don’t want to get into a whole religious conversation,
00:46:58 but it’s very easy for,
00:47:00 you could see how religions could call them angels
00:47:04 or devils or what have you.
00:47:06 Because, again, if you’re trying to fit it
00:47:08 into a framework of cultural understanding,
00:47:12 the first thing you reach for is God.
00:47:16 And so when you look at what these things are,
00:47:21 and again, with the angels and the devils,
00:47:24 in a similar sort of way, their communication is limited.
00:47:29 They just kind of give little, what’s the oracle of Delphi?
00:47:33 They kind of give these Delphic pronouncements,
00:47:36 and then it’s up to you to figure out
00:47:37 what it is that they really mean.
00:47:39 Yeah.
00:47:41 Steven Greer claimed that a skeleton discovered
00:47:45 in Atacama region of Chile might be an alien.
00:47:50 You reached out to him and took on the task
00:47:53 of proving or disproving that with the rigor of science.
00:47:57 The result is a paper titled
00:47:59 Whole Genome Sequencing of Atacama Skeleton
00:48:02 Shows Novel Mutations Linked with Dysplasia.
00:48:06 Can you tell this full story?
00:48:07 Well, the story was, as you put it right there, correct.
00:48:13 Reached out, got a sample of the body,
00:48:18 did the DNA sequencing, then worked with a team
00:48:22 of two other Stanford scientists
00:48:25 and Roche sequencing group, Roche Diagnostics,
00:48:30 and probably a total team of about 11 or so people.
00:48:33 And as is standard in these kinds of things,
00:48:38 the professors actually don’t do the work.
00:48:40 The students do the work and figured out the answer.
00:48:44 And then we helped them put together the story.
00:48:48 And the story was simply that it was human, 100%.
00:48:54 I went into it thinking it was originally a monkey
00:48:57 of some sort.
00:48:59 I got kind of excited a few months into the process,
00:49:02 thinking, well, what happens if it is an alien, right?
00:49:06 Can you describe some of the characteristics
00:49:08 of the skeleton that makes it unique and interesting?
00:49:10 Primarily, it had dysmorphias of the brain.
00:49:13 And so the first thing I did actually,
00:49:15 when I got pictures of it,
00:49:17 I took it to a local expert at Stanford
00:49:21 and he was on the paper.
00:49:24 And he was the world expert in pediatric bone dysmorphias.
00:49:29 He literally wrote the book on this,
00:49:33 because that’s what you do.
00:49:33 You go to an expert when it’s outside
00:49:35 of your field of interest.
00:49:36 And he said, well, I haven’t seen this particular collection
00:49:40 of mutations before or this physiology before,
00:49:46 but here’s what I think it might be.
00:49:49 And he said, but based on the size of the thing
00:49:53 and the bone density, it would appear to be like six
00:49:59 or seven years old.
00:50:01 Now, again, that’s the thing where I think the lay public
00:50:06 doesn’t understand or takes a speculation like that
00:50:11 and turns it into a fact.
00:50:13 No one ever said that it was that age.
00:50:15 We only said that the bones made it look like it was
00:50:18 that age, but then we went back and looked for,
00:50:22 we went back and looked for genetic explanations
00:50:26 of why things might look the way they did.
00:50:29 And if you, again, read the paper is very carefully
00:50:32 caveated to say that these mutations might result in this.
00:50:38 But what we did find was an unexpectedly large number
00:50:43 of mutations associated with bone growth in this individual.
00:50:48 And it was just a bad roll of the dice, right?
00:50:52 You roll the dice enough times
00:50:53 with enough people born every year
00:50:56 and someone will roll the wrong dice all at once.
00:51:02 So the sad part about it was individuals
00:51:06 in the UFO community who wanted to think
00:51:09 that there was some sort of conspiracy around it, right?
00:51:14 That somebody had somehow convinced all of my students to lie.
00:51:20 I mean, come on, you know, I would lose my job,
00:51:24 first of all, and they would all be in trouble forever.
00:51:31 Yeah, but also it’s just projecting malevolence
00:51:34 onto people that doesn’t, I don’t think exists
00:51:37 in normal populace and especially doesn’t exist
00:51:40 in the scientific community.
00:51:42 The kind of people that go into science,
00:51:43 I mean, this is what bothers me
00:51:44 with the current distrust of science,
00:51:47 is they might be naive, they might not,
00:51:51 especially in modern science, look at the big picture,
00:51:54 philosophical, ethical questions, all that kind of stuff,
00:51:57 but ultimately they’re people with integrity
00:52:02 and just a deep curiosity
00:52:04 for the discovery of cool little things.
00:52:06 And there’s no malevolence, broadly speaking,
00:52:14 in the scientific community.
00:52:15 So, I mean, there’s a bigger story here,
00:52:17 which is, you know, there’s a hunger in the populace
00:52:22 to discover something anomalous, something new.
00:52:25 And, you know, science has to be both open to the anomalous,
00:52:31 but also to reject the anomalous
00:52:35 when the data doesn’t support it.
00:52:37 What do you make of that, you know,
00:52:39 walking that line for you?
00:52:40 Because you’re dealing with UFO encounters,
00:52:42 you’re dealing with the anomalous.
00:52:45 Well, people have said, let’s go back to the Atacama case
00:52:49 that I was debunking it.
00:52:52 Well, debunking is a loaded term.
00:52:54 Sort of assumes that you were going in purposefully
00:52:57 to prove something is wrong.
00:53:00 I wasn’t, I was just going in to collect the data.
00:53:03 And, you know, I showed that this one was human.
00:53:08 There was another skull that somebody had at one point.
00:53:11 It was called the star child.
00:53:12 They called it the star child skull.
00:53:14 I said, you know, I looked at it.
00:53:15 I looked at the DNA sequencing that they had done.
00:53:18 I said, this is human.
00:53:19 End of story.
00:53:22 The people who owned the thing at the time disagreed with me,
00:53:26 and then eventually another group came in
00:53:28 and proved that I was right.
00:53:30 And it’s not about debunking.
00:53:32 It’s about getting the more spectacular and hyped cases
00:53:36 off the table.
00:53:37 I mean, the reason I got interested in it
00:53:39 is because somebody was hyping it.
00:53:41 And not because I wanted to disprove it,
00:53:42 but because I just wanted to know.
00:53:44 And thus, get it off the table, because it’s usually
00:53:46 the most extravagant things that are most likely to be wrong.
00:53:52 Somewhere in the rubble will be something interesting.
00:53:57 And so that’s what you do.
00:53:58 You get the dross off the table.
00:54:02 And then somewhere in the data will
00:54:04 be something worth real inquiry.
00:54:09 And that, if you inquire deeply enough,
00:54:12 will be extravagant as well.
00:54:13 Yes, exactly.
00:54:15 And that’s what actually excites scientists is to, I mean,
00:54:18 you want, with the rigor of science,
00:54:21 to actually reveal the extravagant.
00:54:24 And so look at CRISPR as probably the most perfect
00:54:26 example of that.
00:54:27 These weird sequences in bacterial genomes,
00:54:32 all arrayed one after the other with these strange sequences
00:54:36 around them, but when you looked at the sequences,
00:54:38 they looked like viruses.
00:54:41 And so how did they get there?
00:54:42 And lo and behold, after a lot of effort and work,
00:54:46 well, a couple of Nobel Prizes went out the door.
00:54:48 But these strange things ended up
00:54:52 having extraordinarily extravagant possibilities.
00:54:57 You’ve also looked at UFO materials.
00:55:00 You are in possession of UFO materials yourself.
00:55:03 Claimed UFO materials, alleged.
00:55:07 Alleged UFO materials, that’s right.
00:55:08 So what’s another term?
00:55:11 Weird materials that don’t seem to have a story.
00:55:17 They have a story that doesn’t seem to be of natural origins,
00:55:20 but it’s not, you know, there’s a process to proving that.
00:55:25 And that process may take decades, if not centuries,
00:55:30 because you have to keep pulling at the string
00:55:33 and discover where they could possibly come from.
00:55:35 But anyway, you’re in a possession
00:55:37 of some materials of this kind.
00:55:41 Can you describe some of them and maybe also
00:55:45 talk to the process of how you investigate them,
00:55:48 how do you analyze them?
00:55:50 Right, so let’s say that there’s two classes of materials
00:55:53 that I’ve been given by people.
00:55:56 And they’re not given by the government or anything,
00:55:58 just given people who’ve collected them,
00:56:00 and there’s a reasonable chain of evidence associated
00:56:03 with them that you believe is not just a pebble somebody
00:56:05 picked up off a road.
00:56:09 There are almost always things that people have claimed
00:56:12 have either been dropped off as like some sort
00:56:15 of a leftover material, molten metals,
00:56:19 or they are from an object that was released from this
00:56:26 or that kind of exploded.
00:56:29 They’re almost always metals.
00:56:31 I have some couple of things that
00:56:32 might be biological that are interesting that I haven’t
00:56:34 really spent a lot of time on yet.
00:56:36 When you look at a metal, you basically, well, OK,
00:56:39 what are the elements in it?
00:56:42 And what’s it made of?
00:56:44 And so there’s pretty standard approaches to doing that.
00:56:47 Most of them involve a technology
00:56:49 called mass spectrometry, and there’s probably
00:56:52 about five or six different kinds of mass spectrometry
00:56:54 that you could bring to bear on answering it.
00:56:57 And they either tell you, depending
00:56:59 upon the limit of the resolution of the instrument,
00:57:02 they either tell you the elements that are there,
00:57:05 or they tell you the isotopes that are there.
00:57:07 And you’re interested not just in knowing whether something
00:57:09 is there or not, you’re interested in knowing
00:57:12 whether there are the amounts of it,
00:57:17 and in the case of elements, how many different isotopes
00:57:22 are there.
00:57:23 And that’s kind of where, in some of these cases,
00:57:25 it gets interesting.
00:57:27 Because in at least one of the materials,
00:57:30 as we first studied it, the isotope ratios of, in this case,
00:57:34 it was magnesium, are way off normal.
00:57:37 And I just don’t know why.
00:57:40 It doesn’t prove anything.
00:57:43 All it proves is that it was probably accomplished
00:57:48 by some kind of an industrial process.
00:57:51 Whether it’s the result of a process,
00:57:55 and this is sort of the leftover,
00:57:57 or whether it was made that way for a particular purpose,
00:58:01 I don’t know.
00:58:02 All I know is that it was engineered.
00:58:09 That’s it.
00:58:11 But then the question is, sort of you go one step deeper,
00:58:16 why would you engineer it?
00:58:20 Right.
00:58:21 Why engineer it, and what does engineered means?
00:58:24 There’s all kinds of, it could be a byproduct,
00:58:27 it could be the main result of an engineering process,
00:58:34 it would be a small part of the engineering process that
00:58:37 is the main part.
00:58:39 Well, so the ratios of isotopes for any given element
00:58:43 are basically the result of stellar processes.
00:58:48 Supernova blew up sometime several billion years ago.
00:58:55 That became a cloud.
00:58:56 Those atoms coalesced gravitationally
00:59:00 to form another sun, and a ring that became a rocky planet.
00:59:07 And the ratios of the isotopes were determined
00:59:11 at the time of that explosion.
00:59:14 And so everything in the local solar system
00:59:17 is more or less of that ratio, depending
00:59:20 upon certain gravitational difference.
00:59:22 But by fragments of a percent, not whole tens of percent
00:59:28 difference.
00:59:29 So what do humans use isotopes for?
00:59:32 Mostly to blow stuff up.
00:59:34 I mean, the vast majority of the isotopes
00:59:36 that have been made in the per pound or ton
00:59:40 are things like certain ratios of plutonium and uranium
00:59:44 to blow stuff up.
00:59:45 We don’t make or engineer isotopes, which today
00:59:51 is relatively easy to do, but it’s still expensive.
00:59:54 For any other reason, apart from, let’s say, anti cancer,
01:00:00 we use stable isotopes and money these days
01:00:03 as a counterfeiting tool.
01:00:04 You basically embed certain ratios of isotopes
01:00:08 in to make it harder for counterfeiters to accomplish.
01:00:14 But other than that, we don’t do anything with that.
01:00:16 So why would you make grams of such material in this one case
01:00:21 and drop it around on a beach in Brazil?
01:00:25 So which case are we talking about?
01:00:26 Describe that, because this is the Ubatuba case.
01:00:30 Can you describe this case a little bit further,
01:00:32 like what material we’re talking about, just the full story
01:00:35 of the case?
01:00:36 It’s an interesting one.
01:00:37 It’s an interesting one.
01:00:38 So a fisherman saw an object that released something,
01:00:43 or it exploded.
01:00:45 And it was this relatively, I’ve got some big chunks of it,
01:00:51 relatively pure magnesium with obviously something else in it
01:00:55 because magnesium burns.
01:00:56 So it had something in it that would, other metals,
01:01:00 simple alloy that would prevent it from basically burning up.
01:01:07 And so the question is, and so then we
01:01:10 had two pieces that came from two different chains of custody,
01:01:15 both claimed to be from the same object.
01:01:19 At least physically, when you look at the two things,
01:01:23 they look the same.
01:01:26 So we took small fragments of each of them.
01:01:29 We put them in an instrument called a secondary ion mass
01:01:32 spec, which is an extremely sensitive instrument.
01:01:35 And it can see down to 0.0001 mass units,
01:01:41 which is important for, let’s say, more arcane reasons.
01:01:46 But it’s a sensitive instrument.
01:01:48 And so one of the chains of custody,
01:01:52 we had two pieces from the same chain of custody,
01:01:55 and then two pieces from the other chain of custody.
01:01:59 One of them had completely normal magnesium isotope
01:02:04 ratios, magnesium 24, 25, 26.
01:02:06 And the other was off, not just slightly off, way off.
01:02:09 And they were both off to the same extent.
01:02:14 I mean, it was sort of like you had an internal control
01:02:18 of what was normal.
01:02:18 And you had this other one, which was wrong.
01:02:22 And so you’re left with kind of an open question.
01:02:28 Was this a hoax?
01:02:29 Were these two chains of custody, one of them a hoax,
01:02:32 that somebody purposefully introduced those things?
01:02:35 Because you could do it.
01:02:36 It would cost a lot.
01:02:38 I mean, at the time that this was found,
01:02:40 I guess the 1970s or so, it might have been earlier,
01:02:45 I forget, the amount that I had would
01:02:49 have cost several tens of thousands of dollars to make.
01:02:53 And again, it’s not something you would just throw around.
01:02:56 And why would you do it in the hope that some guy 30 years
01:02:58 from then would pick it up and study it?
01:03:02 Yeah, it’s a very subtle, subtle troll.
01:03:05 It’s a long term plan.
01:03:08 So I just don’t know what to make of it,
01:03:12 except it’s interesting.
01:03:15 So a different kind of question that you’re asking
01:03:17 is, what constitutes evidence?
01:03:21 So is this sufficient evidence? Absolutely not.
01:03:27 But somebody’s put it forward.
01:03:29 I have the time.
01:03:30 It’s my time.
01:03:33 I’ll study it.
01:03:33 And my objective is to sort of take
01:03:36 those that I think are credible enough
01:03:38 and do a reasonable analysis, put it out there.
01:03:41 And maybe somebody else will come up with an idea
01:03:43 as to what it is.
01:03:44 Now, what would be better is some sort of true technology,
01:03:51 something that is obviously.
01:03:53 We don’t have it.
01:03:55 And people like Neil deGrasse Tyson and Seth Shostak
01:04:00 have come out rightfully and have said,
01:04:04 when you show up with something really obviously technology
01:04:11 that we don’t understand, then we’ll pay attention.
01:04:16 Not just material.
01:04:17 Not just material.
01:04:18 A piece of metal is interesting.
01:04:24 And several of the things that I’ve looked at
01:04:26 and other things that people have come to me with,
01:04:29 we’ve found to be completely banal
01:04:32 or were actually pieces of aircraft
01:04:35 that were invented back in the 1940s.
01:04:38 And so take them off the table.
01:04:40 But I think, again, I think showing up
01:04:46 with technology that we humans would find completely novel
01:04:50 is actually a really difficult task for aliens
01:04:53 because it obviously can’t be so novel
01:04:56 that we don’t recognize it for what it is.
01:05:00 And I would say most of the technology aliens likely have
01:05:04 would be something we don’t recognize.
01:05:07 So it’s actually a hard problem how to convince ants.
01:05:11 You first have to understand what ants are tweeting about.
01:05:16 What they care about in order to inject into their culture.
01:05:21 Because that’s why I think it would be the technology
01:05:26 that you could present is in the space of ideas,
01:05:29 is try to influence individual humans with the encounters
01:05:35 and try to, with this kind of thing that you mentioned
01:05:39 about us not taking messages, about us not taking care of the world.
01:05:46 It’s difficult. I mean, for them to understand,
01:05:49 you have to come up with trinkets that impress us.
01:05:52 I mean, maybe the very technology,
01:05:56 the fascination with the development of technology
01:05:58 and the development of technology,
01:06:00 the actual act of innovation itself
01:06:03 is the thing that they’re communicating.
01:06:05 I mean, this is kind of what Jacques Vallée thinks about, is the role of…
01:06:11 The control system, he calls it.
01:06:13 The control system. Well, let me ask about Jacques.
01:06:16 Who is he? You know him. Who is Jacques Vallée?
01:06:22 What have you learned from him about life, about UFOs,
01:06:30 about technology, about our role in the universe?
01:06:33 Well, I met Jacques actually soon after the whole Atacama thing happened.
01:06:40 I was visited by those people associated with the government
01:06:43 and whatever around the Havana…
01:06:47 What ended up mostly being Havana syndrome patients,
01:06:50 but also Jacques at the same time.
01:06:51 And they were actually working behind the scenes with each other,
01:06:54 that, oh, here’s this Stanford professor
01:06:57 who is willing to talk about this stuff and investigate things.
01:07:01 Maybe we should go talk to him.
01:07:03 And he reached out through a colleague
01:07:06 and he and I had lunch actually at the Rosewood Inn up on near Sandhill.
01:07:12 So Jacques is one of the first openly active scientists,
01:07:19 and he’s really a scientist, in this area going back to the 1960s.
01:07:26 And he’s put forward a number of ideas,
01:07:31 speculations about what it might be that people are interacting with.
01:07:36 And the first thing that I learned from him
01:07:38 is this notion of what he called Kabuki theater,
01:07:41 that many of the things that people have seen are…
01:07:45 I remember reading his books and thinking,
01:07:47 he uses this word absurd a lot.
01:07:50 He said, the things that people claim they see are absurd, right?
01:07:56 A ship doesn’t land in a farmer’s field
01:08:00 and then come up and knock on the door and say,
01:08:02 can I have a glass of water?
01:08:03 And these are stories literally out of newspapers from the 1930s.
01:08:08 It’s absurd.
01:08:09 And the other thing that people say, ships don’t crash.
01:08:12 If you’re so technologically advanced, you don’t crash.
01:08:15 It’s absurd that they crash.
01:08:18 So he says, this is put on as a show.
01:08:24 It’s an influence campaign, right?
01:08:29 It’s not meant to influence individuals.
01:08:31 It’s meant to influence a culture as a whole.
01:08:35 Maybe they don’t look at us as individuals.
01:08:37 Maybe they look at us as an organism that lives on a planet, right?
01:08:43 And perhaps rightly so.
01:08:45 And so that’s how you interact with them.
01:08:47 That’s how you influence them.
01:08:48 So that was one of the first things that kind of took me back
01:08:51 and realized, wow, there’s actually…
01:08:53 maybe there’s a puppet master behind the scenes that’s doing this influencing
01:09:00 and that all this stuff about aliens is just not true, per se.
01:09:05 They’re just a representation of something that is meant to influence.
01:09:09 So that was probably the most interesting.
01:09:11 I mean, the man is brilliant.
01:09:13 He’s also, and I’m sorry, Jacques, he can also be incredibly annoying
01:09:18 to have a conversation with because he will pick apart your arguments
01:09:23 or anything that you think you know
01:09:25 and show you why you don’t know what you think you know.
01:09:28 And he used the example that, for me, that is all you need
01:09:34 is one counter example to any conclusion and you’re wrong.
01:09:41 And so I learned from him…
01:09:43 I mean, I’m supposed to be a good scientist, but I learned from him,
01:09:47 don’t talk about conclusions, just talk about the data
01:09:50 because data is not wrong.
01:09:52 I mean, convince yourself that the data is not wrong or not an artifact,
01:09:55 but be careful about your conclusions because whatever is going on,
01:09:58 it’s much more complicated than we imagine.
01:10:02 Wow, that’s powerful.
01:10:03 Being able to always step back because we humans get excited.
01:10:07 Yeah.
01:10:07 We start to jump to conclusions from the data, but always step back.
01:10:11 Well…
01:10:11 Powerful, being able to always step back because we humans get excited.
01:10:15 Yeah.
01:10:15 We start to jump to conclusions from the data, but always step back.
01:10:19 Well, in some of my Twitter feeds, when I dare to go on Twitter,
01:10:23 are full of, well, when are you going to give us the answer?
01:10:27 Science is not immediate.
01:10:29 You’re going to have to be patient.
01:10:31 And even some of my science colleagues have said, well, where’s the data?
01:10:35 My answer to them has been, where’s been your work to try to produce any?
01:10:39 I’m not here to give you everything on a silver platter.
01:10:43 We talked offline how much I love data and machine learning and so on.
01:10:48 And it’s been really disheartening to see the U.S.
01:10:51 government not invest as much as they possibly could into this whole process.
01:10:56 So let’s jump to the most recent thing, which is what do you make of the report
01:11:01 titled Preliminary Assessment, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena that was released by the
01:11:08 Office of the Director of National Intelligence in June 2021.
01:11:12 So this is what’s like, okay, we’re going to step back and we’re going to like,
01:11:18 where do we stand and where do we hope the future is?
01:11:21 What do you make of that report?
01:11:22 Is it hopeful?
01:11:23 Is it?
01:11:24 I see it as very hopeful, very hopeful.
01:11:26 I think the adults are finally stepping up and being in charge, right?
01:11:31 In the good sense of adult.
01:11:33 What’s that?
01:11:34 In the good sense of adult.
01:11:37 This childlike curiosity is a pretty powerful thing.
01:11:40 That’s true, yeah.
01:11:42 But it’s also, I think, the people who were worried that the populace at large might run
01:11:47 screaming into the streets and riot, you know, have, you know, they basically,
01:11:53 the empiric evidence is they’re wrong.
01:11:55 You know, these videos and all these things have been out for now, what, five years?
01:12:00 Most people don’t even know about it, right?
01:12:02 So as hyped as it’s been and all over the newspapers that it’s been and et cetera,
01:12:08 you know, even Tucker Carlson has talked about it many times on his news program.
01:12:14 Joe Rogan has.
01:12:15 A lot of people don’t know about it.
01:12:16 So I think people, if it’s not affecting their day to day life,
01:12:20 they’re going on with their day to day life.
01:12:23 So, but that said, I think it was an important sea change in the internal
01:12:30 discussions going on in the government because, and the reason being,
01:12:35 that I think this is actually partly true with the maturation of human social technology.
01:12:43 It was becoming so obvious that this stuff was showing up again and again and again around our ships.
01:12:49 They just couldn’t keep it quiet anymore, right?
01:12:51 And so it’s like, we need to do something about it.
01:12:53 And Lou Elizondo and Chris and others, to their great credit, found the right angle to talk about this.
01:13:00 It says, well, okay, let’s say it’s not out there.
01:13:04 Maybe it’s the Russians, the Chinese or somebody else.
01:13:06 We should know about this because we damn sure know it’s not us.
01:13:11 So that to me is an important thing to finally be a little bit more open about the matter.
01:13:20 But like I often say, I’m not looking for people to give me permission to do anything.
01:13:26 I’m just going to do the analysis myself with what I have.
01:13:29 Avi Loeb has taken the same approach.
01:13:31 He said, I’m not going to wait for the government to give me telescopic information about technologies
01:13:38 or things that might be even on our own solar system.
01:13:41 I’m just going to collect it myself.
01:13:44 And that’s the right way to do it, right?
01:13:46 Don’t wait for somebody else to give it to you.
01:13:48 It’s also possible to inspire a large number of people to do a wider spread data collection.
01:13:55 Yes.
01:13:55 I mean, you yourself can’t do a large enough data collection that would,
01:14:00 if you’re talking about anomalous events, you should be collecting high resolution data
01:14:08 about everything that’s happening on Earth in terms of like, in terms of the kind of things
01:14:15 that would indicate to you a strong signal that something weird happened here.
01:14:20 And this is why governments can be good at funding large scale efforts.
01:14:26 Yes.
01:14:26 I mean, you know, NASA and so on, working with SpaceX, with Blue Origin, you know,
01:14:33 fund capitalistic sort of fund companies, fund company efforts to do huge moonshot projects.
01:14:42 Right.
01:14:43 And in the same way, do huge moonshot data collection efforts in terms of UFOs.
01:14:47 I mean, we’re not, it needs to be like 10X, like one or two orders of magnitude more funding.
01:14:53 Exactly.
01:14:53 To do this kind of thing.
01:14:55 And I understand on the flip side of that, if you make it about what are the Russians,
01:14:59 whether the Chinese doing, you know, make it a question of geopolitics, it gets touchy.
01:15:06 Because now you’re kind of taken away from the realm of science and…
01:15:11 Making it military.
01:15:12 Making it military.
01:15:13 Some of the greatest, this is what makes me as an engineer, makes me truly sad that some
01:15:18 of the greatest engineering work ever done is by Lockheed Martin, and we will never know about it.
01:15:24 Yeah.
01:15:25 I agree.
01:15:26 I agree.
01:15:26 I wish we were, it was different, but it’s the world we live in.
01:15:33 You know, but related to that UIP task force announcement that you just said, you know,
01:15:39 the bill was passed in the Department of Defense and now it formally establishes an office
01:15:44 to collate that information and also to be transparent about it.
01:15:50 Money is now set aside, right?
01:15:52 What do you think of it, just in case people don’t know, the DOD establishing new department
01:15:57 to study UFOs called Airborne Naming Command.
01:16:02 But yes, Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group.
01:16:07 Do you know how to pronounce that?
01:16:08 No, I do not.
01:16:09 No.
01:16:09 AOI MSG.
01:16:11 It’s stupid and needs to be renamed, but…
01:16:13 AOI MSG.
01:16:15 AO, all right, is directed by the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security.
01:16:22 What do you make of this office?
01:16:24 Are you hopeful about this office?
01:16:26 I think there’s still a tug of war going on behind the scenes as to who’s going to control
01:16:30 this.
01:16:32 But I do know, though, that money has been set aside that will be used to make things
01:16:41 more public, right, to start to get others involved.
01:16:45 And, you know, I’m involved with an effort to get other academics involved.
01:16:51 So you think there might be some of that money could be directed towards funding maybe like
01:16:55 groups like yours to do some research here.
01:16:59 So they would be open to that, you think?
01:17:01 I hope so.
01:17:01 I mean, nothing is set in stone yet.
01:17:04 So, you know, and I’m not hiding anything because I just don’t know anything, right.
01:17:08 But I do think that there will be public efforts.
01:17:14 Now, there are being set up other private efforts to bring monies involved and to use
01:17:21 that to leverage and get access to some of the internal resources as well.
01:17:28 So what you’re seeing is kind of an ecosystem building up in a positive sense of people
01:17:36 who are willing to do the research.
01:17:39 So, you know, before it would be you couldn’t even go to a scientist and ask them to help.
01:17:45 Now, if there’s money, as I said before, scientists are essentially capitalists.
01:17:50 We go where the money is.
01:17:52 I mean, the work that I’ve done, I did out of my own pocket.
01:17:55 And probably about $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 of money went into the paper we published
01:18:02 out of my own pocket.
01:18:05 But the amount of money that needs to go in is in at least the few millions to do
01:18:10 a proper analysis of these materials.
01:18:12 The work I know that the Galileo project is involved with, it’s probably in the, you
01:18:19 know, 5 to 10 million range to get stuff done.
01:18:22 But that’s actually a relatively modest amount of money to accomplish something that
01:18:28 has been in the zeitgeist for decades.
01:18:32 I should also push back a little bit on something you probably will agree with.
01:18:37 You said scientists are essentially capitalists.
01:18:39 What I’ve noticed is there’s certainly an influence of money, but oftentimes when you’re
01:18:43 talking about basic research and basic science, the money is a little bit ambiguous to what
01:18:52 direction you’re doing the research in.
01:18:54 And the scientists get really good at telling a narrative of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re
01:19:00 fulfilling the purpose of this funding, but we’re actually, they end up doing really what
01:19:05 they’re curious about.
01:19:06 Yes.
01:19:07 And of course you cannot deviate like if you’re getting funded to study penguins in Antarctica,
01:19:11 you can’t start building rockets, but probably you can because you will convince some kind,
01:19:17 you’ll concoct a narrative saying rockets are really important for studying penguins
01:19:21 in the Antarctic.
01:19:22 Right.
01:19:22 I think that’s actually, this is one thing I think people don’t generally understand
01:19:29 about the scientific mind is I don’t know how capitalistic it is because if it was,
01:19:35 they would start an effing company.
01:19:37 No, no, no, no.
01:19:38 I mean, when I meant capitalist, I didn’t mean in the, they’ll start companies per se.
01:19:44 I mean, we can only do the research where there’s money.
01:19:48 And so from, you know, maybe it’s a bad use of the term capitalist.
01:19:53 But we will only do the research where there’s money.
01:19:57 I mean, why do most people work, many biologists work in cancer?
01:20:03 Uh, work in cancer research because there’s a lot of money there.
01:20:08 It’s an important problem, but I might not have ever gotten involved in it if there wasn’t
01:20:14 money.
01:20:14 I might’ve gone and I was going to be a botanist when I, when I was a kid.
01:20:20 That’s what I wanted to do.
01:20:22 Um, so having money available will bring people to bear.
01:20:28 Now, another mistake that’s often actually made, I think by the lay public about science
01:20:33 is that people think that we’re paid to do things.
01:20:36 Just as you said, I get a research grant and luckily from the NIH there, they give you
01:20:41 a fair amount of latitude.
01:20:43 I will go my own way and I’ll find something.
01:20:45 I might’ve proposed something, but I’ll end up somewhere entirely different by the end
01:20:50 of the project.
01:20:51 And that’s how good science is done.
01:20:52 You follow the, you follow the data, you follow the results.
01:20:56 Um, and so that’s what I’m hoping can be done here.
01:21:01 I think the worst kind of thing that could be done with this subject area is to put it
01:21:07 inside another company where they have a set plan of what it is they’re going to do and
01:21:13 the scientists either tell, do what the executives tell them to do or not.
01:21:18 That isn’t how anything will really get discovered.
01:21:21 Put it, get it out into the public, get open minds thinking about it and then publishing
01:21:27 on it and doing the right kind of work.
01:21:29 That’s how real progress will be made with this.
01:21:33 Let’s again, put our sort of philosophical hats on.
01:21:37 Do you think the US government or some other government is in possession of something of
01:21:45 extraterrestrial origin that is far more impressive than anything we’ve seen in the public?
01:21:53 If I, I’ve not seen anything personally, but if I believe the people who I don’t think
01:21:59 can lie, yes.
01:22:02 This is how does that make you feel in terms of the way government works, the way our human
01:22:07 civilization works, that there might be things like that and we’re not, they’re not public.
01:22:13 Is, is, is there a hopeful message for transparency that’s possible?
01:22:17 Like if you were, if you were, uh, in power and I’m not saying president because maybe
01:22:22 the president is not the source of power here.
01:22:25 Would you release this information in some way or form?
01:22:29 Yes, if I were, I think it would, I think it’s, I think it’s something that can bring
01:22:36 humanity together, right?
01:22:38 I think that knowledge of this kind of thing to know that we are, you know, we are more
01:22:44 alike than we are different in comparison to whatever this is, is, uh, is a positive
01:22:53 thing for us.
01:22:55 Um, and to know, you know, I don’t necessarily care that the government has been hiding it.
01:23:01 And I think, you know, people who’ve been talking about what we should give government
01:23:05 officials or whatever amnesty, I think that’s probably the right, the right answer.
01:23:10 We don’t, this isn’t a time to look back and say, you did something wrong.
01:23:14 You did whatever you did because that was the data you had available to you at the time
01:23:17 and those, you had good reasons for doing it.
01:23:19 Now, if your reasons were selfish, if your reasons where you wanted to do it because
01:23:24 you wanted to monetize it yourself, uh, to the, to your benefit, but against that of
01:23:30 others, then I think maybe there’s something else that could be said, but you know, an
01:23:36 opportunity to get all this information out.
01:23:38 If I were in charge, I would, I would try to do it.
01:23:41 Now I might be shown something though that says, there’s a reason why you don’t want
01:23:46 to let anybody know this.
01:23:47 Maybe you don’t want to let anybody know this and maybe you don’t want everybody have having
01:23:50 access to unlimited, uh, energy because maybe you might turn it into a bomb or something
01:23:57 that gives you hints that something like unlimited energy is possible, but you haven’t figured
01:24:03 it out yet.
01:24:04 And if you make it public, maybe some of the other governments you have tensions with we’ll
01:24:10 figure it out first.
01:24:11 Right.
01:24:12 I mean, it’s kind of an arms race going on, I think in all forms and it’s, it makes me
01:24:17 truly sad because, uh, it’s obvious that, um, for example, the origins of the COVID
01:24:25 virus, it’s obvious to me that the Chinese government, whatever the origins are, is interested
01:24:32 in not releasing information about it because it can only be bad for the Chinese government.
01:24:40 And every government thinks like this, like every, actually this has been disappointment
01:24:46 to me talking to PR folks at companies, like they’re always nervous.
01:24:54 They’re always like conservative in the sense like, well, if we release more stuff, it can
01:25:00 only be bad.
01:25:02 And then an Elon Musk character comes along who tweets ridiculous memes and doesn’t give
01:25:08 a fuck.
01:25:10 And I’ve been encouraging CEOs, I’ve been encouraging people to be transparent.
01:25:15 And of course, government is national security is really like another level as human lives
01:25:20 at stake.
01:25:22 But let’s start at the lighter case of just releasing some of the awesome insides of the
01:25:28 tech, how, how the sausages made the technology and being transparent about it because it
01:25:34 excites people.
01:25:36 It uh, like you said, it, it connects people and inspires them.
01:25:42 It’s a good for the brand.
01:25:44 It’s good for everybody.
01:25:45 I, I honestly think this kind of idea that people will steal the information and we use
01:25:49 it against you is, um, is an idea that’s not true in his idea of the 20th century.
01:25:56 Like you said, some of the benefits of the social media, uh, our, our social world is
01:26:02 that transparency is beneficial and I hope governments will learn that lesson.
01:26:06 Of course, they’re the, usually the last to learn such lessons.
01:26:10 What do you make of Bob Lazar’s story in terms of possession of aircraft?
01:26:15 Do you believe him?
01:26:16 I don’t believe in the Bob Lazar story to be quite honest.
01:26:19 I mean, I, uh, Jeremy Corbell has done a great job interviewing him and, uh, has done some,
01:26:28 you know, beautiful, uh, documentaries.
01:26:31 Um, I just don’t, I, I don’t know how to interpret it.
01:26:38 And um, you know, and again, there’s some of the people who I fraternize with think
01:26:45 it’s all rubbish.
01:26:46 Uh, yeah, but he, maybe he’s right, but I don’t know.
01:26:49 I mean, the, the problem is, and um, this is a little bit different about how I approach
01:26:55 the whole area than a lot of others.
01:26:58 I’m less interested in going over old paperwork and all these old histories of who said what,
01:27:04 you know, the whole, he said, she said of the history of, of UFOs, I’m a scientist.
01:27:13 I worked on the brain area because it’s something I can collect data on.
01:27:18 I can go back to the same individual, collect their MRI again and redo it.
01:27:22 I can hand that MRI to somebody else.
01:27:24 They can analyze it.
01:27:26 I can get materials, I can analyze them.
01:27:28 I can get some of these skeletons.
01:27:30 I won’t touch any skeletons ever again, but I can analyze it and somebody else can reproduce
01:27:34 the data.
01:27:35 Yeah.
01:27:36 I mean, that’s what I’m good at.
01:27:37 And so, you know, I’m, I, I, I’m not going to go into the whole, I’m not a historian.
01:27:43 Yeah, that’s true.
01:27:44 But there’s a human side to it.
01:27:48 I want, sometimes I think with these, because again, anomalous, rare events, some of the
01:27:54 data is inextricably connected to humans, the observations, I mean, I hope in the future,
01:28:02 you know, that, that, that sensory data will not be polluted by human subjectivity.
01:28:08 But you know, that’s still, that’s still powerful data, even direct observations, like if you
01:28:14 talk about pilots.
01:28:15 And so it’s an interesting question to me, whether Babasar is telling the truth, whether
01:28:19 he believes he’s telling the truth too, and what also, what impact his story and stories
01:28:26 like his have on the willingness of governments to be transparent and so on.
01:28:32 So you know, you have to credit his story for captivating the imagination of people
01:28:38 and getting the conversation going.
01:28:41 He’s maintained his story for all these years with little to no change that I’m aware of.
01:28:46 So but there’s so many other people who are, let’s say, experts in that story.
01:28:52 Their gut, you know, you accumulate a set of sort of circumstantial evidence where your
01:29:01 gut will say that somebody is not telling the truth.
01:29:04 Yeah.
01:29:05 You mentioned Avi Loeb, I forgot to ask you about Oumuamua.
01:29:11 You know, because you’ve analyzed specimens here on Earth, what do you make of that one?
01:29:17 And what do you make broadly of our efforts to look, look at rocks, essentially, or look
01:29:23 at objects flying around in our solar system?
01:29:28 Is that a valuable pursuit or maybe most of the stories can be, most of the fascinating
01:29:34 things could be discovered here on Earth or on other nearby planets?
01:29:37 Just going to Oumuamua, you know, I think Avi’s insight is an interesting speculation,
01:29:46 right?
01:29:48 Like I was saying before, people can sometimes look at something and not see it for what
01:29:51 it is.
01:29:53 Somebody would just look at that and say, oh, it’s an asteroid and dismiss it.
01:29:58 There was something odd about the data that Avi picked up on and said, well, here’s an
01:30:03 alternative explanation that doesn’t fit, that actually better fits the models than
01:30:08 it just being a rock, you know.
01:30:10 And to his credit, he just has ignored the critics because he believes the data is real
01:30:17 and is using that then as a battering ram to go after other things.
01:30:22 And I think that’s, I think that’s great.
01:30:24 You know?
01:30:25 Yeah.
01:30:26 What, what is his main conclusion?
01:30:27 Does he say it could be of alien extraterrestrial origin?
01:30:31 Is that his?
01:30:32 Well, that’s one of the things.
01:30:33 I mean, he, you know, he’s explained how it could be a light sale.
01:30:38 And a light sale is certainly within near human capabilities to make such a thing.
01:30:44 I think Yuri Milner, he’s a Russian billionaire.
01:30:49 He’s involved, I think, in a project to make light sales with laser, you know, to, to launch
01:30:56 them with laser power, essentially, towards Alpha Centauri, right?
01:31:03 So it’s something that humans could make.
01:31:07 I think Avi’s proposal is perfectly within the realm of possibility.
01:31:11 I mean, sadly, the thing is, you know, now nearly out of our solar system.
01:31:15 Yes, I mean, to me, that’s inspiring to do greater levels of data collection in our solar
01:31:21 system, but also here on Earth.
01:31:23 And it just seems like we should be constantly collecting, collecting data because the tools
01:31:28 of software that we’re developing get better and better at dealing with huge amounts of
01:31:31 data.
01:31:32 It’s changing the nature of science, I mean, collect all of the data, right?
01:31:37 Collect the data.
01:31:38 I mean, I, I, the Galileo project asked me over the weekend to join and I did.
01:31:43 So you know, I’m not a specialist in any of the stuff that they’re doing.
01:31:48 But you know, in looking at the list of people who are on there, there are really no biologists
01:31:54 on there.
01:31:55 So at, at some point, if my expertise is required for something.
01:31:59 What’s the goal and the vision of the Galileo project?
01:32:01 Better talk to Avi, but my understanding and just actually looking at the, at the sort
01:32:06 of the bylaws this morning, literally just got them, is number one, collect the data
01:32:12 on UAP.
01:32:13 And number two, collect data on local, potentially local technological artifacts.
01:32:21 I need to look into this.
01:32:23 This is fascinating.
01:32:24 And Avi is heading the Galileo project.
01:32:27 Yeah.
01:32:28 Have you spoken to him?
01:32:29 On this podcast?
01:32:30 Yes.
01:32:31 That was before, I believe it was before he was headed.
01:32:32 Oh.
01:32:33 Is this a new creation?
01:32:34 Yeah.
01:32:35 The Galileo project was, I think it’s about six or seven months old now.
01:32:37 Okay.
01:32:38 You know.
01:32:39 That’s amazing.
01:32:40 And he’s getting a group of scientists together.
01:32:41 Oh yeah.
01:32:42 That’s awesome.
01:32:43 Actually, I am, I was looking at some of their stuff over the weekend.
01:32:47 I’m shocked at the level of organization that they’ve already got put together.
01:32:50 That’s amazing.
01:32:51 It looks like a moonshot project.
01:32:53 I mean, I’ve been involved with a lot of NIH, large NIH projects, which involve a lot of
01:32:59 people in coordination and they’re putting it together.
01:33:06 So you’re extremely well published in a lot of the fields we began this conversation with.
01:33:17 So you’re a legit scientist, but yet you’re keeping an open mind to a lot of ideas that
01:33:27 maybe require you to take a leap outside of the conventional.
01:33:33 So what advice would you give to young people today that are in high school or in college
01:33:40 that are dreaming of having impact in science or maybe in whatever career path that goes
01:33:47 outside of the conventional that really does something new?
01:33:53 If you believe in something, you believe that an idea is valuable or you haven’t approached
01:34:01 something, don’t let others shame you into not doing it.
01:34:06 As I’ve said, shame is a societal control device to get other people to do what they
01:34:12 want you to do rather than what you want to do.
01:34:16 So shame sometimes is good to stop you from doing something unethical or wrong, but shame
01:34:21 also is something that is circumscribing your environment.
01:34:27 I’ve never let people who’ve told me, you shouldn’t do that line of science, you should
01:34:33 be ashamed of yourself for even thinking that, give me a break.
01:34:38 Why is it wrong to ask questions about this area?
01:34:41 What’s wrong with asking the question?
01:34:43 Frankly, you’re the person who’s wrong for trying to stop these questions.
01:34:48 You’re the person who’s almost acting like a cultist.
01:34:53 You basically have closed your mind to what the possibilities are, and if I’m not hurting
01:34:58 anybody, and if it could lead to an advance, and if it’s my time, why does it bother you?
01:35:04 I had a very well known scientist once tell me that I was going to hurt my career talking
01:35:10 about this.
01:35:11 If anything, it’s enhanced my career.
01:35:13 I have a couple of questions on this.
01:35:15 So first of all, just a small comment on that.
01:35:18 I’ve realized that it feels like a lot of the progress in science is done by people
01:35:24 pursuing an idea that another senior faculty would probably say, this is going to hurt
01:35:29 your career.
01:35:30 I think it’s actually a pretty good indicator that there’s something interesting when a
01:35:36 senior wise person tells you this is going to hurt your career.
01:35:40 I think that’s just the one, as a small, if I were to give advice to young people, if
01:35:45 somebody senior tells you this is going to hurt your career, think twice about taking
01:35:49 their advice.
01:35:50 Yeah.
01:35:51 I mean, I think that’s the primary thing.
01:35:54 And the other, I tell my own students, I have a lab of about 20, 30 people and it’s been
01:36:00 that big since 1992.
01:36:03 People come and go.
01:36:06 It’s not the data that falls in line that’s so interesting.
01:36:14 It’s the spot off the graph that you want to understand.
01:36:21 When something is way off the graph, that’s the interesting thing because that’s usually
01:36:26 where discovery is.
01:36:28 And the number of times that I’ve stopped people in my lab and said, wait a second,
01:36:32 go back a few slides.
01:36:34 What was that?
01:36:35 And then it ended up being something interesting that made their careers, I could count on
01:36:42 a few hands.
01:36:44 Yeah.
01:36:45 Get excited by the extraordinary that’s outside of the thing that you’ve done in the past.
01:36:53 Just on a personal psychological level, is there, I’m sure at Stanford, I’m sure in you
01:37:01 exploring some of these ideas, there’s pressure.
01:37:05 How do you not give in to the pressure?
01:37:09 How do you not give in to the people that push you away from these topics?
01:37:17 What would you say is shame?
01:37:19 I just point to my successes.
01:37:22 I say, you’re the ones who told me not to start companies all this time ago.
01:37:28 And now you’re the one coming to me for advice for how to start a company.
01:37:34 But from the scientific area, it’s you’re wanting to take something off the table that
01:37:43 might be an explanation.
01:37:47 How is that the scientific method?
01:37:50 I reverse shame them.
01:37:54 So purely with reason through conversation, you’re able to do that.
01:37:56 So it doesn’t feel, because to me it would just feel lonely.
01:37:59 There’s a community.
01:38:01 There’s a community of science, and when you’re working on something that’s outside a particular
01:38:08 conventional way of thinking, it can be lonely.
01:38:12 There’s in the AI field, if you were working on neural networks in the 90s, it could be
01:38:17 lonely.
01:38:18 I have met some of the most fascinating people ever that had I stayed the conventional track,
01:38:23 I would never have met.
01:38:26 Truly brilliant people because of this.
01:38:31 So it is for those worried about, well, should I step outside of my comfort zone?
01:38:40 You’re going to meet some really interesting people.
01:38:42 And because I’m open about this area, I’ll go and give a talk in Boston, Harvard or MIT.
01:38:51 And at dinner, inevitably, this subject comes up.
01:38:57 And inevitably somebody else at the table will admit both that they’re interested or
01:39:01 that they’ve seen something.
01:39:03 And suddenly the whole tone of the conversation changes.
01:39:07 It’s kind of like there’s safety in numbers and then, or I’ve had people come to me afterwards
01:39:13 after dinner and say, Hey, I don’t talk about this openly, but.
01:39:19 So the number of scientists who know that there’s something else going on is much larger
01:39:27 than the scientific community would like to think.
01:39:32 That’s a really powerful one, which is, I don’t talk about this openly, but here’s what
01:39:38 I believe.
01:39:40 And you’d be surprised how many people speak like this and hold those beliefs.
01:39:44 And I am optimistic about social media and a more connected world to reveal more and
01:39:50 more, like us not to have these two personalities, we’re like this public and private one.
01:39:56 We’ve mentioned the big questions of the origins of the universe.
01:39:59 What do you think is the meaning of this whole thing for us humans, our human existence here
01:40:06 on earth, or just at the individual level of a human life?
01:40:10 What Gary is the meaning of life.
01:40:15 I think that what we’re going through today with this realization, it’s kind of like you’ve
01:40:25 lived on an island your whole life and you’ve looked across the ocean and you’ve never imagined
01:40:32 there was another island with anybody else on it.
01:40:35 And then suddenly a ship with sails shows up.
01:40:39 You don’t understand it, but you realize that suddenly your world just got a lot bigger.
01:40:45 I think we’re in one of those moments right now that our world view, our galactic view
01:40:52 is opening to something a little bit bigger.
01:40:55 And not just that there might be somebody else, but that there’s something else.
01:41:03 And what it is, is yet to be understood.
01:41:06 And the fact that it isn’t understood to me is what’s exciting because I can fill it with
01:41:13 my dreams.
01:41:16 And this discovery our world might is about to get a lot more humbling and a lot more
01:41:25 fascinating once we look out and realize we were on an island all along.
01:41:30 It makes us both smaller but larger at the same time to me.
01:41:34 You know, I can look outside at the stars and think and imagine what else might be out
01:41:42 there.
01:41:43 And although I know that I will never see it all, it excites me to know that it’s there.
01:41:50 Well Gary, both to respect your time and also because at 12 I turned into a princess, let
01:41:58 me just say thank you for doing everything you’re doing as a great scientist, as a person
01:42:05 willing to reject the conventional, and thank you for spending your extremely valuable time
01:42:10 with me today.
01:42:11 Thanks for talking.
01:42:12 Thanks so much.
01:42:13 It was great talking.
01:42:15 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Gary Nolan.
01:42:17 To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
01:42:21 And now let me leave you with some words from Stanislav Lem in Solaris.
01:42:27 How do you expect to communicate with the ocean when we can’t even understand one another?
01:42:34 Thanks for listening and hope to see you next time.